You Don't Have to Buy the Whole Company
"We'll grant exclusive Dive-in service across the VIP rooms and suites of all thirty-six Nodae Hotel locations nationwide. That includes the Japanese Nodae Hotels, of course. Unfortunately, I can only offer a two-year exclusive window."
Shin Bin-sun's mind kicked into high gear.
The first hotels hadn't even had televisions. Installing TVs, then massage chairs, then jacuzzis, then layering in every new technology that came along — that was the beating heart of the hotel business, the thing that separated a superior chain from everyone else.
If they could offer Dive-in's bottomless well of content for two full years... the game was over.
Ten simulators per hotel ought to do it.
"And if other hotels buy them too?"
"We can't stop that. But it'll be burned into the consumer's mind. They won't know for certain whether the other hotels have simulators — but they'll know that if they walk into a Nodae Hotel, a Dive-in simulator will be waiting."
The corners of Shin Bin-sun's eyes lifted.
This was getting interesting.
Sticking a handful of simulators in hotel rooms still felt a little small, though.
"That's a bit modest on its own... Jinwoo oppa, there's something else, isn't there? There's no way your scale is that small."
Jung Jinwoo let out a short laugh.
"On top of that, you can install them at Nodae Group's amusement facilities. And I'll grant Nodae Group the rights to run a simulation-room franchise — the same model as PC cafés or karaoke rooms."
"Huh?"
A franchise business?
Operations like that looked messy for Saengsong, MG, or Gyeondae Group to run. Too much hassle.
But if it actually caught on, a simulation-room franchise could be a genuinely solid business. If Nodae Group as a whole couldn't take it on, Shin Bin-sun could build it out on her own.
SA Telecom could run it too, of course — but Nodae Group already had Nodae-ria as a franchise brand, didn't they?
"Why would you give that to us?"
"If you try to eat everything, you get indigestion. And we've got plenty of important businesses that actually need doing."
Meaning it was too small-time for him to bother with himself.
The simulation-room franchise was small? Even a rough estimate put it in the trillions of won.
Thanks to their connection with Jung Jinwoo, each of them had landed a promising future industry of their own.
Number Five looked around at one another's flushed faces.
"Mr. Jung... I feel like we keep... just taking from you..."
Lee Jinho stepped forward to offer his thanks.
"Not at all. We all have to help each other. I wouldn't be here without all of you, would I? Well then, I'll be heading back. Dive-in will be in touch soon."
Jung Jinwoo rose, and everyone stood with him. He dipped his head in a bow, and they all bowed in return.
Just as he had arrived, Jung Jinwoo slowly left the suite.
"I just don't get it!"
"What now?"
"He could just issue orders like Pineapple and vacuum up all the profit himself. Why pull us in?"
"There's risk! It costs a fortune. He's trying to spread the risk..."
Koo Hyungwoo snorted as he looked at Jung Hyunmoo.
"You think Jung Jinwoo worries about money? It's not about the money. He's literally setting a table so we can eat."
"Then why? Why set a table for us? He'd make a killing if he did it himself..."
"Because it's a joke to him. Pocket change, that kind of money..."
At Lee Jinho's words, every eye in the room snapped wide.
"What?"
"All of it together would be over a hundred trillion won... and that's pocket change?"
"Oh my, a hundred trillion is pocket change at Saengsong? As expected of Korea's greatest company."
"A hundred trillion isn't pocket change for us either. Don't joke around."
Koo Hyungwoo cut in, his expression turning serious.
"What the hell is Jung Jinwoo, anyway? He said taking Dive-in global would cost a thousand trillion. He's already put in two hundred trillion... Does Saengsong have eight hundred trillion lying around? How is he even going to raise that kind of money?"
"Now that I think about it, it's insane. I was bragging about winning three billion, and that means Jinwoo oppa can mobilize something like eight hundred trillion."
"He must have it. That would explain everything. So all those little side businesses adding up to a hundred trillion are just too much of a hassle for him."
At Lee Jinho's words, every jaw in the room dropped.
Korea's number one, two, three, four, and five — people who had gathered here believing they were the richest of the rich. Compared to Jung Jinwoo, they felt like minnows.
A million employees across all their group companies, grinding away for a full year, generated maybe two to three hundred trillion in revenue. And that was only Saengsong, MG, and Gyeondae. Other companies barely scraped together a hundred trillion in sales, if that.
Net profit? Even Saengsong only cleared around fifty trillion. Nodae Group had been running at a loss lately.
"Maybe... Jung Jinwoo is richer than all of us put together."
"Well, of course. We're third- and fourth-generation chaebol. How much money could we actually have?"
"That's not what I mean. I think Jung Jinwoo is richer than all five of our group companies combined."
The other four fell silent, turning it over.
"That's ridiculous! Even the world's richest people only have two or three hundred trillion. You're saying Jung Jinwoo is four or five times richer than them?"
Now that they thought about it, it didn't make sense. If he were that rich, the news would have been screaming about it already.
"That eight hundred trillion is probably coming from other investors. Places like RCF."
"You think so?"
Lee Jinho tilted his head — and that was when Shin Bin-sun jumped in.
"Hyungwoo oppa, Jinho oppa! You two have been talking like you know something the rest of us don't. What even is this RCF? Let us in on it. What is it? I searched and nothing came up. I want to be able to pretend I know things too."
At Shin Bin-sun's words, Koo Hyungwoo broke into a wide grin.
"There's a thing, Bin-sun. You'll find out eventually."
And just like that, every foundation was in place.
Number Five would be satisfied. A new industry was being born, and they would sit at its center as its backbone.
Dive-in service would launch first in Korea, the Arab world, the United States, and France. The cost: roughly two hundred trillion won. Expanding into China and India — and then the Spanish-speaking world on top of that — would add another eight hundred trillion in hardware costs alone.
There was no need to rush that. Watch the market, then decide.
The Munpia acquisition was winding toward completion. Once it closed, Baek Geum would take the helm as Global CEO and lead the new Munpia from the front. Do Ye-rip and the rest of Dive-in's core talent would be positioned to support him.
Arabic, French, and English Munpia web novel pages would open as well. The Arabic page, as Aziz had so emphatically insisted, would serve as the foundation for cultivating the Arab world's own content industry. Korean web novels would be there, yes — but Arab writers would post their own work too.
Aziz had said it with absolute confidence.
The foreign-language Munpia pages would carry the service through webtoons. From video onward, everything would hand off to Dive-in.
Once the French and English work was finished, the next stage was Cantonese and Japanese Munpia pages — to take Taiwan and Japan. After that: Latin America and Spain, Portugal and Brazil, Italy, Germany, Iran, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, China, and India.
That was the big picture. After that, individual countries and languages would come online one by one.
One question remained. Following Oh Gong-tae's recommendation, Jung Jinwoo was still turning over whether to put Yoon Jong-seok in charge of the games division. Even if Yoon Jong-seok was the master of a community like Game Magazine, the games business was never going to be confined to Korea.
The moment of decision arrived sooner than expected.
Jung Jinwoo, Ko Yoon-seok, and Oh Gong-tae sat together in one room.
The question on the table: whether to acquire Pipe, the company behind the Steamer game platform — or OneCent, the company behind the MOBA title Rule.
"Having Director Oh here takes a great deal of the burden off me. I don't know games well enough to be of much use, I'm afraid."
"Not at all, Vice Chairman. It's an honor just to be included."
Oh Gong-tae was twenty-eight — two years younger than Jung Jinwoo — but Ko Yoon-seok treated him with impeccable, polished courtesy. It made Jung Jinwoo, who spoke to Oh Gong-tae in easy, casual speech, feel vaguely like the rude one in the room.
"So, Gong-tae. You want to buy Steamer?"
"Yeah."
"May I offer a thought?"
Jung Jinwoo's face lit up.
"Of course. We asked you here because we wanted your opinion, Vice Chairman."
"Then I'll speak plainly. I don't know this field well, but from what I've reviewed, most of Steamer's catalog appears to be middling mini-games — and nearly identical clones, at that. There's no flagship title the way there is at Hurricane, AE, or OneCent."
Jung Jinwoo and Oh Gong-tae both stared.
He'd said he didn't know the field. He had the market nailed. That wasn't something you could say after glancing at a briefing for five minutes.
"Vice Chairman... when did you even look into this?"
"I consulted the artificial intelligence that Director Oh was kind enough to share a link to. He said to put it to good use."
"Ah."
Oh Gong-tae was thoroughly stunned — mouth hanging open and everything.
Jung Jinwoo still hadn't made up his mind. If you looked only at Steamer's growth prospects in the current games market, the right call was not to buy it.
"If you look at the growth potential of the IPs, though... it's not bad. On top of that, Dive-in can't really serve ultra-high-fidelity games — it's too much strain on the users. The titles Steamer carries are a perfect fit for us."
"But they can't compare to OneCent's mega-hit, Rule. Even as the global games market contracts and collapses, Rule is one of the few titles still holding its ground, as I understand it."
Vice Chairman Ko Yoon-seok wanted the company with a proven mega-hit.
Rule was a five-versus-five game: pick a champion, fight, destroy the enemy base. It had originally been developed by Elliot Games, which OneCent had acquired for four hundred billion won a little over a decade ago. Elliot Games was now worth more than a hundred times that.
"It's expensive! And even if we buy OneCent, the restrictions are brutal — we'd be watching the Chinese government's face at every turn."
That was the real problem. OneCent was a Chinese company, listed on the Hong Kong exchange, no two ways about it.
As Jung Jinwoo sat turning it over, Oh Gong-tae pressed on.
"Steamer has over a hundred thousand games. The well is bottomless."
"All of them put together still wouldn't match the popularity of Rule alone."
"That's true, but... we can't just serve one game. Steamer is packed with titles that fit us perfectly."
"What we actually need is a hundred decent games, at most. We can't serve a hundred thousand. And the rest — I don't mean to be harsh, but they look like they belong in the trash."
Running Dog had been a single-studio investment. To properly launch virtual-reality game service through Dive-in, they needed a whole slate of titles. Acquiring Steamer would solve the supply problem.
The catch: aside from a handful of exceptions, most of the catalog was unpopular. Strip out a thousand titles and the rest were essentially garbage.
The entire online-games genre was shrinking. Mobile had carved off roughly half the market, and Shorts and Nertubers were filling the boredom that games used to fill.
Buy Pipe, Steamer's parent, and you'd be swallowing ninety-nine percent trash along with the one percent you actually needed. Buy OneCent, and you'd have the Chinese government breathing down your neck at every turn.
Jung Jinwoo turned it over and over — and then, all at once, his mind lit up as if a bolt of lightning had struck.
Oh Gong-tae and Ko Yoon-seok's faces went rigid.
"Acquire everything? Pipe is forty trillion, OneCent is around eighty — that's over a hundred and twenty trillion. Have you lost your mind, hyung?"
"Chairman, that may be overreaching a little."
"No. We only buy the games we actually need. Gong-tae, you pick about a hundred titles off Steamer. Buy just those and two trillion should cover it. Vice Chairman, reach out to OneCent and sound them out on selling Rule. Their situation is ugly right now — they might actually be willing. If they sell, acquire it around thirty trillion. If they won't... float acquiring Elliot Games itself at around forty-five. And if that doesn't work either, offer about five trillion for exclusive virtual-reality usage rights. We buy the IP license. And if even that falls through... we just build a similar game ourselves."
"Whoa..."
"As expected..."
Oh Gong-tae was stunned. Vice Chairman Ko Yoon-seok was nodding.
Even if they acquired Steamer, they wouldn't automatically get secondary-use rights to every IP on the platform. So rather than swallowing a dinosaur like Steamer whole, buying only the IPs that actually looked promising was both more certain and far less risky.
"Hyung... you weren't a figurehead after all. You're a genius..."
Oh Gong-tae looked as if he had just seen Jung Jinwoo's true face for the first time.
"You're only figuring that out now?"
Jung Jinwoo grinned at him. Beside the still-stunned Oh Gong-tae, Ko Yoon-seok watched Jung Jinwoo with a look of quiet, deep satisfaction.